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Six months after the first beta, elementary OS Freya beta 2 was released yesterday. Based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (which is supported until April 2019), Freya beta 2 comes with various UI improvements, UEFI/SecureBoot support along with other interesting changes as well as almost 600 bug fixes.

For those not familiar with elementary OS, this is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution which ships with its own shell, called Pantheon, and applications that respect the elementary OS philosophy: beautiful, fast and minimalistic.

Changes in elementary OS Freya beta 2

elementary OS Freya beta 2 ships with quite a few user interface improvements and even though most of them are minor, they should improve usability and bring even more polish to the Pantheon desktop. Among the applications that have received various UI improvements in this beta release are applications like Calendar and Photos (now with header bars) as well as Slingshot and System Settings:

Also, Freya beta 2 ships with a brand new calculator app:

Besides updated elementary-specific applications, 3rd party apps like Geary, Simple Scan, Document Viewer (which now uses header bars) and more were also updated:

Furthermore, two new System Settings plugs were added - Notifications (which allows disabling notification bubbles and/or sounds for specific apps and there's also a switch to enable a "Do Not Disturb" mode) and Firewall -, which you can see in the screenshots below:

A minor but useful change in the latest elementary OS Freya beta 2 is the addition of the window overview (called Multitasking view, which is a combination between the workspace switcher and scale) launcher to Plank (the dock), which should make this very cool feature more discoverable:

Other changes in elementary OS Freya beta 2 include:

better support for Samba in Files;

updated development libraries (including GTK 3.14);

security and stability improvements;

Audience media player is now called Videos in elementary OS, following the elementry OS naming scheme;